Paying Tribute to Democracy

Article excerpt

If the good feelings that Independence Day evokes are something
you would like to prolong, I have two books to recommend. Both of
them, believe me, will deepen your appreciation of this country,
its history and its people.

The first, published last year, is "The Nightingale's Song" by
Robert Timberg, a first-class journalist at The Baltimore Sun. It
is the story of five men whose lives, like the author's, have been
decisively shaped by the Naval Academy and the Vietnam War. Three
of them became famous, in different ways, because of the
Iran-Contra scandal: former Reagan administration National Security
Council officials Robert C. (Bud) McFarlane, John Poindexter and
Oliver L. North. The fourth is the mercurial James H. Webb Jr.,
novelist and onetime Navy secretary. And the fifth is John S.
McCain III, a Vietnam POW and now senator from Arizona.

"The five major characters in this book," Timberg writes,
"display vast differences in personality and style, but some
remarkably similar strains as well. In a way, though none would be
comfortable with this characterization, they are secret sharers,
men whose experiences at Annapolis and during the Vietnam War and
its aftermath illuminate a generation, or a portion of a generation
- those who went.

"Each in his own way stands as a flesh-and-blood repository of
that generation's anguish and sense of betrayal. Whatever they
later became - hero, hot dog, hustler, or zealot - they were for a
time among the best and the brightest this nation had to offer. And
in their formative years - at Annapolis and during the Vietnam era
- they shared a seemingly unassailable certainty. They believed in
America."

What Timberg has done in this remarkable book is to provide, in
five vivid, interconnected biographies, a reflection on the
meaning, and limits, of patriotism. I guarantee you will not think
of these men - or of that powerful abstraction, patriotism, that
drove them - in the same way again.

That John McCain could endure what Timberg describes in awful
detail and emerge so unembittered that he has become perhaps the
most effective advocate of improved relations with Vietnam is a
tribute to him - and to the American spirit. …